Jim Gleeson is a Horrible Writer

Jim Gleeson works in Madison at a hospital setting up computer systems. He is also the 2007 winner of San Jose State University's 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The contest celebrates bad writing and Gleeson is a happy camper. He's also $250 richer.

Gleeson's fictional story starts with this humble beginning:

"Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten per cent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee," Gleeson wrote.

Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State, started the contest in 1982. Of Gleeson's piece Rice gave the following review:

a "syntactic atrocity" that displays "a peculiar set of standards or values."

Reported on the Canadian Press. Gleeson says he submitted about 200 entries into the contest. He didn't really think hard about any of them.

"It's like you take two thoughts that are not anything like each other and you cram them together by any means necessary," Gleeson said. He claimed he took time off from his current project, a self-help book for slackers entitled "Self-Improvement Through Total Inactivity," to pen his winning entry.

Gleeson credits his time in college in preparing him for his umm masterpiece. The contest takes it's name from Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton whose novel started out with the familiar "It was a dark and stormy night." Entrants are encouraged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Practice up and next year you could be the worst writer out there also!